How to tell if you're under mind control

1. You display any of the symptoms exhibited above by Danny Kaye aka Hawkins aka The Great Giacomo ("King of Jesters, and Jester of Kings"), from the 1956 motion picture The Court Jester.

2. You attended any level of schooling in a modern nation-state after the year 1926.

3. You are terribly concerned about your own personal contribution to global warming but completely oblivious to evidence pointing to ongoing geoengineering (and if anyone brings the subject up to you, you become agitated at them and call them an outrageous "conspiracy theorist," rather than exhibiting any outrage at the people involved in spraying chemicals from aircraft over populated areas, crops, your own home, etc).

4. You can muster no sense of outrage over increasing surveillance of your everyday activities, and when told that the state now spends millions placing sophisticated video and audio recording devices in public places such as transit buses, or that they tap into your iPad using WiFi and record your cache of recent geophysical location data, you nod absently and forget you ever heard about it.

5. You readily and uncritically accept media accounts of major traumatic events which always seem to point to the need for increased state authority over the individual, without conducting any of your own "due diligence," and you repeat phrases such as "more surveillance" or "every command" in a sort of absent, monotone voice. You become agitated at the mention of possible alternative explanations and refuse to entertain them in your mind -- in fact, you act as though someone has convinced you that such thoughts might burn you if you touch them.

6. You cannot entertain possible alternative accounts of ancient history, whether they involve advanced ancient civilizations whose accomplishments upset the conventional narrative of a generally unbroken line of steady Progress from primitive times to our modern superiority, or whether they involve catastrophic explanations for geological features rather than the tectonic paradigm that has become the only acceptable geological model. Serious mention of such alternative possibilities causes you agitation and powerful negative emotional response.

Of course, if you were actually under the spell of a Griselda (Gri-who-lda?) the way "Giacomo" is in the video clip above, you would probably dismiss any suggestion that you were actually under any kind of outside influence whatsoever (angrily deny it, in fact). Forms of mind control are really the opposite of what we might call "consciousness," and consciousness -- according to symbolist, Pythagorean, and illuminator of magical ancient Egypt John Anthony West -- is the goal of human existence according to all the ancient cultures and ancient sacred scriptures (see discussions here and here for example).

Since, based on the above list (and the list could go on and on) we're all under mind control to some extent, moving from a state of "hypnosis" to greater levels of consciousness should be one of the areas to which we pay a lot of attention in this world.

The video clip below shows a recent "TED talk" given by entertainer and "gentleman thief" Apollo Robbins, in which he demonstrates and discusses the art of "misdirection," or as he puts it, "controlling someone's attention" in order to be able to almost perfectly "predict human behavior."

He begins his talk by saying that such an ability would be "the perfect super-power -- actually kind of an evil way of approaching it." He then goes on to say that "Actually, it's often the things that are right in front of us that are the hardest things to see -- the things that you look at every day, that you're blinded to."

Apollo Robbins then gives an entertaining demonstration of his "super-power," proving to the audience that it really is possible (as he puts it at about the 2:30 mark in the video) to so manipulate the attention as to enable others to "steer your perceptions" and "control your reality." He explains that there are proven techniques to "exploit" (his word) the "gateway to the mind" and by doing so to cause another person to miss things that are taking place right before his or her very eyes.

At the end of his remarkable demonstration, Apollo Robbins talks straight to the audience and says,

Attention is a powerful thing. Like I said, it shapes your reality. So, I guess I'd like to pose that question to you: If you could control somebody's attention, what would you do with it?

And on that note, throwing it back to all his viewers (including all of us through the magic of the web), he ends his presentation.